Beyond Selidor

There's a blackbird that's taken to standing on the kitchen roof (just below our bedroom window), singing its heart out every morning around 6am to greet the dawn. It's like a natural alarm clock, and it's such a gentle introduction to each new day that I can hardly begrudge it.

I didn't know I needed a four-day weekend so badly until I had one, with four days stretching gloriously ahead of me, every hour my own to do with as I chose. It ended up being the perfect balance and mixture of activities, planned in such a way that everything worked out seamlessly, with even the weather cooperating. I'm good at this — organising holidays at home — but I so rarely have the opportunity.

I've described everything below in words, but have a representative photoset, as well.

This extended weekend's events can be grouped under a series of subheadings, as follows:

Movement
I swam 1km at the pool, three times: on Friday, Sunday, and today, gliding back and forth through the water, which was blissfully empty today and Friday, but too crowded for my liking on Sunday morning. On Saturday, I went to my classes at the gym, and then Matthias and I walked 4km out to Little Downham (about which more below), through fields lined with verdant green trees and flowering fruit orchards, watched by sleepy clusters of cows and horses, and then returned home the same 4km way. I did yoga every day, stretchy and flowing in the sunshine, listening to the birdsong in the garden. Yesterday, Matthias and I walked along the sparkling river, and then back up through the market, which was full of the usual Sunday afternoon of cheerful small children and excitable dogs.

Wanderings
As is the correct way of things on long weekends, we roamed around on the first two days, and stuck closer and closer to home as the days wore on. On Friday night, we travelled out into the nearby village of Whittlesford (via train and rail replacement bus), and on Saturday we did the walk to Little Downham, but beyond that I went no further than the river, the market, and the gym, and I was glad of it.

Food and cooking
The Whittlesford trip was to attend a six-course seafood tasting menu with wine pairings, which was delicate, exquisite, and a lovely way to kick off the weekend. In Little Downham, we ate Thai food for lunch at the pub, cooked fresh, redolent with chili, basil and garlic. I made an amazing oliahercules fish soup for dinner on Saturday, filled with garlic and lemon juice and briny olives and pickles. Last night I spent close to three hours cooking a feast of Indonesian food: lamb curry, mixed vegetable stir fry, slow-cooked coconut rice, and handmade peanut sauce, and it was well worth the effort. We'll be eating the leftovers for much of the rest of the week. We ate hot cross buns for breakfast and with afternoon cups of tea. We grazed on fresh sourdough bread, and cheese, and sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Growing things
On Sunday, we picked up some seedlings from the market: two types of tomato, cucumber, chives, and thyme, and I weeded the vegetable patches, and planted them. I was delighted to see that the sweetpea plant from last year has self-seeded, with seedlings springing up in four places. The mint and chives have returned, as have the various strawberry plants. Wood pigeons descend to strip the leaves from the upper branches of the cherry trees, and the apple blossom buzzes with bumblebees.

Media
The fact that we picked Conclave as our Saturday film this week, and then the Pope died today seems almost too on the nose (JD Vance seems to have been to the Pope as Liz Truss was to Queen Elizabeth II: moronic culture warring conservatives seem to be lethal to the ageing heads of powerful institutions), but I enjoyed it at the time. It reminded me a lot of Death of Stalin: papal politics written with the cynicism and wit of Armando Ianucci, and at the end everyone got what they deserved, and no one was happy.

In terms of books, it's been a period of contrasts: the horror and brutality of Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, in which aliens descend to extractively rake over the remains of an Earth ruined by Cold War-era nuclear catastrophe, in an unbelievably blunt metaphor for both the colonisation of the continents of America, and the way human beings treat livestock in factory farming, and then my annual Easter weekend reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, about the implacable, inhospitable power of the sea, cut through with selfless human compassion. Both were excellent: the former viscerally horrifying to read, with aliens that feel truly inhuman in terms of biology, social organisation, and the values that stem from these, and unflinching in the sheer extractive exploitation of what we witness unfold. It's very of its time (for something that's so interested in exploring non-cis, non-straight expressions of gender and sexuality, it ends up feeling somewhat normative), and while the ideas are interesting and well expressed, I found the writing itself somewhat pedestrian. It makes me wonder how books like this would be received if they were published for the first time right now. Greenwitch, as always, was a delight. Women/bodies of water is basically my OTP, and women and the ocean having emotions at each other — especially if this has portentous implications for the consequences of an epic, supernatural quest — is my recipe for the perfect story, so to me, this book is pretty close to perfect.

I've slowly been gathering links, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll leave them for another time. I hope the weekend has been treating you well.

The sun and warmth continues, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors and moving this weekend. The less said about the state of my mental health, the better — but there are still nice things.

Yesterday, Matthias and I walked for about 10km to the village of Sutton, which was having a beer festival. (I don't drink beer, but I like the vibes of beer festivals in new-to-me venues.) The first half of the walk is lovely: on a little public footway across the typical flat East Anglian fields, then through the village of Witchford (very picturesque), and past an excellent farm and gardening shop. After that, however, the second half of the walk is on a footpath/cycle path along a major motorway, and although it's not difficult to walk (flat footpath all the way), it's very noisy and cluttered with speeding cars.

The beer festival was — incongruously, to my mind — in a church, and was a fairly standard rural English affair: lots of families with little children running wildly around the church, a handful of older men who I see from time to time around Ely, dogs of various sizes, and a massive group of Morris dancers. Matthias and I stayed for a few hours, then caught the little bus back into town (which, astonishingly, arrived on time, and took exactly as long as it was supposed to take on the drive back to central Ely). The weather was so lovely that we stayed out in town, hanging out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar (along with everyone else, it seemed), and then eating dinner out in a newish restaurant that we'd been wanting to try for a while.

We were home early, and I was already tired enough by 8pm or so to want to go to bed, but tried to keep myself awake until a reasonable hour ... and of course when I did want to go to sleep, it eluded me for hours, and then was filled with ridiculous anxiety dreams (the dream in which I struggled for what felt like hours to get Zoom to load to teach a class at work, after which point one of my dream!students remarked sourly that if their trainer was unable to get Zoom to work, they didn't trust me to be competent enough to teach the content of the class, seemed too much on the nose even for me).

This morning, I dragged my exhausted self off to the pool, and dragged myself through the sunlit water, then returned home for the usual Sunday morning crepes, and laundry (the sight of which, hanging outside, drifting gently in the warm breeze, did lift my spirits). Matthias and I wandered around town, browsing a few stalls at the market, and generally enjoying the sense of everyone enjoying the first stirrings of spring.

This afternoon will be yoga, and reading, and rest.

Reading this week has been almost exclusively rereads, as I continue my nostalgic way through 1990s Australian YA novels. This time, this consisted of two series by two different authors: Robin Klein's Melling Sisters trilogy (historical fiction about four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in rural 1940s Australia, with a scatterbrained, dreamy mother, and a credulous father who has a tendency to be taken in by all kinds of get rich financial scams — prospecting for gold, buying shares in struggling farms or factories), and Libby Hathorn's Thunderwith and Chrysalis, about a teenage girl taken in by her father and stepmother after her mother's death, struggling to find herself in a life marked by loss and unmooring changes. Both series were as good as I remembered them — Klein's historical fiction in particular, which strikes a perfect balance between wacky childhood hijinks and a serious examination of the pain and petty humilations that come from living so close to the edge of financial disaster — and although they covered serious subject matter, they were exactly the kind of rest my brain needed.

The other book I read — Victoria Amelina's posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War — was an exquisite piece of writing, and I feel I can't do justice to it in my current state. I'm hopeful I may be able to come back to it later and say more.

The breeze drifts through the open windows. The garden is alive with flocks of wood pigeons, and pairs of blackbirds. There are pink blossoms on the quince trees. The daffodils are promising to bloom, any day now.

This weekend has been absolutely glorious — exactly the right balance between being out in the world, and indoor cosiness. Saturday started with my usual two hours of classes at the gym, and then I returned home for lunch, through crisp, clear, biting cold air. I spent most of the afternoon cooking — stewing fruit for our weekday breakfasts, and preparing an absolutely massive quantity of northern Thai-style dal, a new-to-me recipe that involved cooking ginger, garlic and shallots under the grill until they were blackened on the outside and took on a smoky flavour.

In the evening, Matthias and I caught the train out to one of the little villages around Cambridge, where — after a half-hour walk through fields in the dark — we had a Burns Night-themed dinner at the local gastropub. The food was great, the fires were lit, people had dogs in the bar area, and in general everything was wintry and lovely.

This morning was spent swimming and doing yoga, and then we headed out after lunch for our monthly walk with our walking group. This time, the walk was around Ely, so we didn't have to be driven there and back, which was great. The weather was terrible — strong winds, scatterings of freezing rain — but it was still great to be out and about, chatting and catching up with everyone. The walk ended at the pub at the end of our street (after everyone walked past our house and gave us tips on how to prune our lavender plants; some of the group are professional gardeners, and the others have allotments and are very knowledgeable about all things botanical), and Matthias and I have just returned home, for a few hours of chilling out until the weekend draws to a close.

I've only finished one book this week, This Woven Kingdom (Tahereh Mafi), the first in a YA fantasy series inspired by Iranian mythology. Honestly, I have to say that it's fairly mediocre — tropey and formulaic, with insta-love between its protagonist and her love interest (who are, of course, Romeo and Juliet-style figures from opposite sides of a supernatural and political conflict), the heroine is super super special with powers and abilities possessed by no one else, the lost heir to a supernatural dynasty, living the life of an unappreciated, much abused drudge, in obscurity, etc, etc. The worldbuilding is paper thin. My tolerance for this kind of thing is very dependent on my mood — and because I was in a good mood this week, I responded far more favourably than the book probably deserved. It's trash, but it's my kind of trash. I certainly can't recommend it, unless you're in the mood for this kind of tropey mush.

I have, however, been reading a lot of other interesting things online, and I will leave you with some links.

I liked this piece on Max Gladstone's newsletter, which I felt had a handy analogy for the challenges of our current moment:

Jiu-jitsu this week gave me a useful opportunity to reflect on defense.

The first instinct when someone’s on top of you, aiming for a choke hold or a submission, is to get that guy t.f. off. You want out of here. The adrenaline hits; you buck, you roll, you twist and kick. Full-on animal spirits.

The trouble is, you spend a lot of energy thrashing about. And, if you aren’t much stronger than the other grappler—who, remember, has gravity on their side—you’re not likely to get anywhere, if your opponent has the faintest clue what they’re doing. Even if you are stronger in general, one or two failed maximum-strength attempts to break free will wear you out. A common first step is to establish frames: defenses that work by structure rather than strength. If you get your arm inside a choke hold that works by isolating your neck, the other guy will have a hard time. The structure of your arm, the bone fact of it, protects you. You can save your strength to seize a later chance.

The author Susan Dennard, who left social media for good in 2022, and slowly weeded out any further opportunities for scrolling aimlessly through any form of digital content (to the point that she now only uses the internet to post long-form writing, read some longform stuff, and communicate via email or videoconferencing/messaging platforms). She's written a recent essay reflecting on the various effects of these choices, which I found to be very relevant to the discussions I've been witnessing around leaving social media, or reframing one's relationship with it.

This piece by Talia Lavin, another in her 'notable sandwiches' series of essays, really encapsulates why I'm glad to have subscribed to her writing. It's about a sandwich, it's about The Count of Monte Cristo (and all its many adaptations), and it's also about this:

But the real fantasy at the heart of Monte Cristo—and what makes me keep returning to it along with all those playwrights and filmmakers and artists and animators—is the fantasy of justice. It’s the wronged man, the victim, rubbing the faces of his abusers into their own crimes; it’s the refusal to be cast away, the combination of the ability, the means, and the desire to right such a fundamental wrong. From a man who cannot even see the sky from his dungeon, Dantes becomes a bolt of vengeance sent from heaven. And because injustice continues, and multiplies; because those who wrong others continue to benefit from it; because the cruel use any means to perpetrate their cruelty—well, the fantasy of destroying them utterly, these ordinary heartless men, has endured for nearly two hundred years. The fact that fantastic resources are needed to enact such justice against the powerful is, amid all the fantastical elements of the story, apropos. The scales are so cruelly tipped that it takes a wonder-tale to reverse them.

Finally, here is an article about Ukrainian scientists researching whether radioactive fungi from the Chornobyl site might be able to function as a radiation shield for journeys to Mars.

I hope your weekends have been filled with nice things.

This is my first year trying out a slightly new format and set of questions for the year-end meme; I made the decision this time last year to retire the previous format (which I'd been using for close to twenty years, since the Livejournal days), the questions of which seemed in many cases more suited to a teenager or undergraduate university student. I've taken this set of questions from falena.

( I'll sing a story about myself )

It's my birthday today, and I've woken feeling refreshed and relaxed in a way that I haven't really felt all year. The morning is going to be spent packing and cleaning the house, before Matthias and I head down to London, where we'll stay overnight en route to travelling by train to his family in Germany tomorrow. We are going out to dinner in London for my birthday, but for the most part it's going to be an ordinary day of travel, with bigger celebrations happening next year.

I'm keeping this post access locked for the time being due to mentioning my travel plans, but will unlock it when we come back.

It's the penultimate Friday of 2024, so I thought I'd go with a bit of crowd-sourcing for today's prompt:

What prompts would you like me to use in Friday open threads for 2025?

List your suggestions in the replies, and feel free to respond to each other's suggestions. As I'm travelling, I can't promise to respond to each reply very quickly, but I'll definitely be looking to your suggestions for Friday posts next year. I also can't promise to use everything — but anything that isn't too similar to something I've used recently is definitely fair game.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I picked the remainder of the apples from our tree, which necessitated climbing the tree itself and handing them down to him. Our fridge is now filled with close to 80 Bramley apples. Autumn is well and truly here!

We've just returned from our monthly walk with our walking group, a meandering loop through the fields (and sometimes some very overgrown, blackberry- and nettle-filled pathways, including one point where an elderly woman emerged from the undergrowth with her dog, informing us that she'd gone through the whole area with a pair of secateurs), on a walk that took us past a massive — and unexpected — three-day eventing equestrian competition, which at least explained where all the horse floats we'd seen driving past were going. The walk finished in an orchard, where we spent some time scrounging around for windfall apples under the trees, just to add to our fridge apple collection! The photoset from the walk is pretty much peak fenland autumn!

Matthias and I added an extra 6km or so onto the walk by walking out in advance to the village where it began, where we had Thai food for lunch in the pub (which is run by a Thai family) before meeting the others. We got home before 5pm (which is early for these things), and now I'm just lounging around, catching up with Dreamwidth for a bit before sorting out dinner.

The only books I've finished this week are a reread — Jo Walton's Arthurian Tir Tanagiri Saga duology, which I deliberately left until this point in the year, because Arthuriana, with its sense of fleeting beauty and irreparable loss, always feels autumnal to me. These books were among my very favourite when I was younger, and I was curious as to how well they would hold up. The answer is very well, and I seriously feel that they are probably the best Arthurian retelling published in this century that I've read, and I could make a case for them being the best Arthurian retelling of the current and previous centuries, depending on how I feel about T.H. White and Susan Cooper's books.

They're set in an alternative version of our own universe, told from the point of view of a female war leader serving under the Arthur figure (this is a world which has gender equality — to a point), and most characters, countries, and plot points are easy to map onto familiar characters from the legends and places and peoples from our own world. (The one exception is the narrator, who has no analogue, and indeed about whom Walton goes out of her way to emphasise has no analogue in a very clever moment that passed me by until this reread.) This retelling draws heavily from the Welsh Arthurian tradition, but later medieval versions are there as well, plus the medieval Irish Táin, and loads of other western European medieval poetry and stories.

Different Arthurian retellings choose to emphasise different things, and Walton's focus is on people's experience of social, political, and cultural rupture brought about by the departure of the equivalent of the Romans from Britain 40 years before the start of the first book, and the arrival of the equivalent of Christianity and the spread of this proselytising religion. Characters who are young adults at the start of the first book have experienced nothing but chaos and civil war, and are in essence fighting to restore a well-functioning political structure in which safety and justice are not dependent on enforcement at the hands of a single powerful ruler, and in which written law will live on and persist after the death of the king whose regime created such law. In other words, they are fighting to build something which they themselves have never experienced, but which their ageing parents describe as some kind of half-forgotten, nostalgic dream.

Walton writes the sheer logistical effort of this — in a way that emphasises the monumental task — in brilliant way, in which polite diplomacy and political marriages, the work of keeping supplies well stocked, the need to have reliable communication through trusted messengers across the length of the country, and the work of setting up communities with marketplaces and prosperous craftspeople is of equal importance to valiant military deeds on the battlefield, and in which all of these things need to work together, with all the personalities involved working harmoniously. She's also one of the few writers writing fantasy (or indeed historical fiction) in a pre-industrial setting in which I really feel that her characters actually believe in their various religions in a tangible way. (It helps that in this world, the divine is palpable; people converse with their gods, the elemental powers of the land can be called on to provide fresh water or safe passage in moments of crisis, characters use charms in their everyday lives to heal wounds, and curses made in earnest are felt in such a way that they become part of the fabric of the universe, and inescapable in their doom.) It makes her depiction of the disruptive, disorienting arrival of a proselytising, monotheistic religion in a world that has until that point been pluralistic and pagan feel real and believable, with characters' individual choices in the face of such change seeming understandably human. The books do a fabulous job of depicting people whose values are very different to our own in a way that doesn't whitewash these differences, but still makes you empathise with their dilemmas and choices.

For me, Arthuriana should have an elegiac tone, a sense that it's written in mourning for something aspirationally beautiful, with built-in flaws that, from the very beginning, inevitably lead to its destruction. There should be a sense of ideals never quite lived up to, whose loss is mourned nevertheless. Walton's books do this, and they do it in a way that is lovely, and that is full of heart. I'm glad I returned to them, and found them to be as I remembered, while discovering new little things that served to increase my admiration of the writing even more.

After a sleepy taxi ride to the airport through the slumbering streets of Vilnius, an early-morning Ryanair flight that left miraculously on time, and an (even more miraculous) sail through Stansted, we arrived home before midday, to a hot, stuffy house, and a dry and feral garden that had somehow managed to not just survive two weeks without us, but also to grow fruit and vegetables in astonishing abundance. (Benign neglect is clearly the way to go with this garden!) Matthias and I have spent the past two weeks on holiday in the Baltic countries — a whirlwind tour that took us through eight cities (or rather six cities and two small towns) in four countries (moving at such a pace at the beginning that we spent the first seven nights of the trip in seven different hotels). This is the longest we've ever been away apart from trips back to visit my family in Australia, where we essentially stay put, so it was very exhausting — but well worth it!

The reason for the whole trip was the wedding of one of Matthias's school friends, who lives in Finland and was getting married to his Finnish fiancée; we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to add a visit to Tallinn, and then decided that when would we next have the chance to be in that part of the world, and added on some time in Latvia and Lithuania as well! We did the whole thing (other than the flights at either end) via public transport: ferry, trains (and an unintended rail replacement bus), which was logistically complicated (especially the trains between Estonia and Latvia, and Latvia and Lithuania, of which there are only one per day on each respective route), but a great experience.

Since I always regret not doing so when travelling, I put pen to paper every day with a few sentences in my paper journal, so I'd remember all the various things we did. I'm very happy to expand on anything noted here, especially if you are considering visiting the same places and want advice or recommendations.

( On the worldroad )

And that about sums it up. That was a lot of transcribing, so I'm going to ignore any typos that I discover later! I feel really fortunate to have had such experiences, and particularly appreciate that Matthias and I are such keen walkers, since it allows for a kind of sponteneity and serendipitous discovery that balances well with my own impulses to plan and schedule everything to a rigid degree. Walking means you can revel in the unexpected, encountered en route to the planned activities!

I have a few final impressions of the trip and region as a whole, but I will leave that to another post — but as I say, I'm happy to expand on anything mentioned here in the comments! I also have extensive photographic documentation of everything documented in writing above, over at Instagram (ronnidolorosa, where I'm always happy to be added by people from Dreamwidth, although give me a heads up if your username there is different to your Dreamwidth one, otherwise I won't add you back).

My weekend started (on Friday evening) meeting Matthias at his workplace in Keir Starmer's constituency, moving on for dinner and a concert (on which more later) in Jeremy Corbyn's constituency, then sleeping overnight in a hotel in Diane Abbott's constituency: the peak north London experience.

Dinner was a bunch of Malaysian starters at the always excellent sambalshiok, but we weren't able to linger, because we had to head down the road to a tiny (but cavernously ceilinged) venue for the gig. Uncharacteristically, we were there for the support acts — nnhmn_ and minuitmachine — and hadn't even heard of the main event, rebekawarrior. The former are female-fronted dark electro acts, the later a dark electro dj (and by the time we got to her set, I was astonished that I'd never heard of her), we danced our delighted, exhausted hearts out, and a fabulous time was had by all. We made our way into the night, and back to our hotel via the overground, and collapsed into sleep.

Saturday dawned cold and cloudy, and I was able at last to try the pastries at pophamsbakery for breakfast — a patisserie I've long been following on social media — and was pleased to discover that they lived up to the hype. We finished our 36 hours in London up with a visit to the British Library, to see their exhibition on Black British music (from Tudor times to the present), which I highly recommend. It's always a bit tricky to do a physical exhibition on a topic that relies so heavily on aural experiences, but they did a good job of telling this complex story. It would have been great if there had been a way to accompany the exhibition with a multipart documentary, just so that the music could have told more of its own story in sound, but I enjoyed things all the same.

After the exhibition, and a quick lunch, we headed back to Ely on the train, and had a lazy Saturday afternoon and evening at home.

Today has also been fairly lazy (apart from both of us doing a bunch of household chores) — slow cooking, slow yoga, lying around reading (Elusive, the second book in Genevieve Cogman's published self-insert Scarlet Pimpernel vampire AU trilogy, which was as swashbuckling good fun as the previous book, with the same reluctance to examine the inherent flaws of the source material's premise while adopting a smugly self-congratulatory assumption of having done so), and restoring energy before the advent of the next working week. I'm severely behind on Dreamwidth, but I'm going to do my best to catch up on my reading page before I go to bed tonight.

I hope everyone's had lovely weekends.

I returned a couple of days ago from a week's holiday in Portugal with my mum. It was glorious, restorative, and coming back to home and work was exhausting. We managed to escape what sounded like a miserable week of weather in the UK for sunshine, swimming, and plenty of time spent outdoors.

The first three days were spent in Lisbon, where we stayed in the old Alfama district in a hotel where we ended up being given an entire apartment (with living room, kitchenette and garden) as a free upgrade. We wandered around the narrow streets, dodging the tiny yellow trams that whizzed past every few minutes, visited an old castle filled with peacocks, and then visited an absolutely wild art collection left as a museum by an eccentric wealthy Armenian in the 1950s (this is very worth seeing, and is free if you visit after 2pm on a Sunday). We caught a ferry across the river and walked along the waterfront under decaying industrial warehouses covered with graffiti, and ate delicious meals in restaurants perched on hills overlooking the whole city.

Then we got on a train, and travelled south to Lagos, a seaside town focused on outdoor tourism. We stayed in a serviced apartment a little out of the town — but ideally located for accessing the nicest beaches and (the reason why we'd chosen this town to visit) excellent day hiking trails. We spent a couple of days there, interspersing our walks with lots of swims in various beaches. The water was clear, sparkling, and incredibly cold — every ocean has its own character, and my experience of the Atlantic was definitely bracing, but highly recommended! Again we ate incredibly well — I'd researched extensively beforehand, meaning we found the one decent cafe-with-good-coffee-and-breakfast-foods in town, the fun rooftop-bar-with-tapas (plus shop selling tinned sardines, ceramics, and expensive homewares downstairs), the nice winebar, and the 'expensive' fish restaurant on the cliff above our favourite beach ('expensive' being a relative term, since a meal for two including bottled water, two glasses of champagne, two glasses of wine, two oysters, two main courses and a shared dessert cost about €60).

Then it was time for our return train, and another 36 hours in Lisbon, where we stayed in a different district, took a daytrip out to Belém for pastéis de nata and a museum which presented Portugal's history of seafaring, navigation and colonisation in the most unbelievably uncritical light, and on to Cascais for more communing with the ocean.

I had to get up early and leave for my flight back to the UK, and Mum went on for three days staying with an Australian friend who owns a house in another part of Portugal. I returned to thunderstorms and torrential rain (and the second worst turbulence I have ever experienced on a flight in my life), and a visit from Matthias's and my friends L and V, who needed a place to stay en route back to Vienna after being in the UK for a relative's 90th birthday party. It was great to see them, especially since the weather had cleared up by then, and we were able to eat our meal of cheese, charcuterie and sparkling wine out on the deck under the fruit trees.

Mum will be back tomorrow, passing through, before we're visited by E, another friend of ours who'll be in this part of the world to campaign for the Labour Party for the upcoming election — as you can see, there's a lot of coming and going, which definitely explains my exhaustion!

I would highly recommend Portugal as a place to visit — there are so many different things to do, depending on your tastes, the people are incredibly friendly, and the food is excellent (and very, very cheap by western European standards). You can see my photos on Instagram (ronnidolorosa), which give an idea of how beautiful everything is, as well. There is one big caveat here, though: I only recommend Portugal if you are able-bodied with no mobility issues (and I'd go as far to say that you need to be comfortable travelling on foot and reasonably physically fit). It is incredibly hilly, with Lisbon in particular made up of lots of steep hills with narrow streets, narrow footpaths, all paved with irregular cobblestones. This is parodic to the point of being a widespread meme: 'Google Maps said it's a ten-minute walk — but it's in Lisbon *insert video of people pushing suitcases up endless sets of near-vertical steps*' Accessible it is not. I even had to carry my mum's suitcase in my arms for fifteen minutes up such a set of hills when we arrived, because she had a four-wheeled suitcase that couldn't be dragged behind her, and it was literally impossible to push the suitcase along on its four wheels as intended because the hills were so steep — be like me and insist on two-wheeler suitcases!

I think I doomed myself by posting about travel mishaps on Friday's open thread, but more about that later. Yesterday, Matthias and I went to London, the main intention being to see dark electro group Rue Oberkampf perform live. Unlike on usual London concert adventures, we were completely unable to find a hotel cheap enough to justify staying overnight, and since the gig was in Islington, we decided to chance it and return home to Ely on the last train of the day.

We travelled down just before lunchtime, had a quick lunch at a new-to-us Mexican place in Coal Drops Yard behind the station (the food scene in the immediate surrounds of King's Cross Station these days never ceases to amaze and delight), and then hopped on the tube to see this art exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was very busy — a Saturday afternoon on the last weekend of the exhibition, so to be expected — but very worth seeing, although inevitably the new works engaging with the gallery's legacy and collection were much more interesting than the source material.

Then we headed across to Islington, dodging the rain, for drinks, dinner, and the concert. It was in my very favourite kind of venue — a tiny little club (this one on the top floor of a pub; the club was only open to ticketholders, the pub was open to whoever wanted to come in for a drink and pizza), with room for no more than sixty or so people. I can see the value in big spectacular arena concerts, but increasingly these days I'm much more interested in these tiny, small-scale events. This particular club seemed to be populated by every ageing goth in London ... and me and Matthias (I was certainly the only person wearing any kind of pastel colours in that room, that's for sure), and the gig was a lot of fun, just really relaxed and low key. We finished up just after 10.30pm, with plenty of time to get back for the last train.

So how do the travel problems come into all this? Well, just before the gig began, Matthias checked the National Rail app and saw that for some reason no trains were going to Ely, but rather stopping in Cambridge. 'Urgent track work,' allegedly. Further reading revealed that a bus would supposedly be there to take anyone needing to go beyond Cambridge, and in any case as long as we could get to Cambridge, a taxi beyond that would be expensive, but not the end of the world. We tried to relax, enjoyed the concert, and made our way to the station.

Things were at least as described, except that the train to Cambridge was slightly late, it was dark and devoid of rail staff, and no information about where this replacement bus would be. It was also pouring with rain. This, however, is not my first rail replacement bus rodeo, and I ensured we were among the first people out of the station, ignoring the crowd stampeding towards the queue at the taxi rank, and spotted a lone bus at the far end of the bus interchange. I dragged Matthias in my wake, it was indeed the bus we wanted, and after we got on (the only people who got on after leaving the incredibly crowded train), the driver ... closed the doors and left! So anyone else who waited in the station in confusion, walked more slowly, or had no idea the bus was a possibility was utterly out of luck!

We made our way meanderingly back to Ely through dark fields, torrential rain, and massive puddles of water that sprayed up alarmingly every time the bus drove through them, and got home only half an hour later than we would have done if the train had gone all the way through to Ely. All in all, not too bad, although I did feel terrible for the other people on that bus who needed to get all the way to King's Lynn!

Today, after not enough sleep, I went to pool first thing in the morning, and swam languidly back and forth for a kilometre while the rain poured down outside. Beyond that, I have not left the house, just lounged around, cooking, eating, and catching up on Dreamwidth. Signups opened for rarepairexchange and I managed to write a letter and sign up, which (given my lack of sleep and slightly downcast current feelings around fanworks exchanges) is something of an achievement!

I hope you've all been having lovely weekends.